<p>I’d reiterate that if people can’t do visits, find some other way to get info, but the visits were pure fun for us. I do think my son learned a lot from them. He did have what seemed liked arbitrary reactions to some schools (rejecting one that had a road running through campus and a chain link fence, but accepting one with a train running through campus). I trusted his instincts. He couldn’t go to 20 colleges or 10 or 5. They were all really great schools, so why should he not let his instincts take over, as long as financials work? We actually did some revisits after acceptances and that was even more fun.</p>
<p>One thing about visiting further away campuses is that it may give the student a better picture of how easy or hard the commute is.</p>
<p>Yeah, if we had visited our son’s campus in the winter, we might have just said no.</p>
<p>One girl I knew back in the day enrolled at a college that was popular with kids from our area sight-unseen, even though it was less than a 2 hour drive away. She said she knew the morning she moved in that it wasn’t a fit, so a year later she was back at home taking classes at the local CC and getting ready to change schools one more time. Something that could have easily been avoided. </p>
<p>Gladwell’s book “Blink” has made gut sense perhaps a cliche, but I think there’s something to it. I suppose you can debate whether HS kids are reaching good decisions or just making a random decision, and since there’s no way to rerun the world and try the alternative it may be an unanswerable question. But I think many HS kids don’t have a realistic picture of what college is like and I think that visiting colleges of various types (as an earlier poster suggested) can be of great value.</p>
<p>For me, it was all about the personality of the schools. I had heard school A had very intelligent, driven students. When I visited school A, however,
I was very disappointed. (I will not name names because I do not want to give my opinions of the schools and give you an opinion that you may not agree with.) I then went to school B, which on paper was my dream school. Now, I wouldn’t go to B if they paid me. I liked C and was smitten by D. D and C are exact opposites. With A and B falling in between the two in terms of personality. That’s something you can’t predict on paper. I will visit E this Thursday, and it is drastically different from A, B, C, and D. In fact, it is unlike any other school. Because of visiting the first 4 schools, I now realize that you can like two schools that are complete opposites, which prompted me to visit E.</p>
<p>I’m only planning on visiting one of the colleges I apply to, unless perhaps if I have an in-person interview as opposed to a phone interview (though I may also end up going to an information lecture at one of my schools- depends on my schedule, and even then it wouldn’t necessarily be at the college). I’m only visiting the school I’m visiting because if I go I will definitely live on-campus, so it’s worth it to know the atmosphere. The other schools I’m applying to are pretty much commuter, so I’m not so worried about things like that.</p>
<p>I believe that from visiting there exists the benefit of creating an array of recognized factors that the kids will use to make their rational or irrational choice.</p>
<p>I also was hoping the the visits would provide a glimpse of the sharp arc of intellectual and social growth that I hope would sweep into my kids’ lives. Where my kids might have been less inclined as high school students to try something because it was too whatever, nerdy, jocky, or different from what they envisioned themselves to be and who they wanted to do it with, the collections over all those campuses of bright, beautiful and engaged kids who had few of the self-imposed restraints might loosen them up a bit.</p>
<p>Similarly I hoped that the schools with their research posters, seminar announcements, and high tech labs and other indicators of their press towards the frontier of knowledge would stir something within them (whether or not it was consicous) to join the march.</p>
<p>I hoped that the collection of experiences gained from the visits would make the idea that there is a life beyond the style they’ve become comfortable with more a general idea and less tied to a specific institution.</p>
<p>I do think the schools have very distinct personalities. We started out taking photos because we thought we might get the campuses mixed up, but we stopped pretty quickly. Every campus was completely distinct and we would never confuse one for another. I still remember them very well 6 years later. We gave each school a full day though. We all enjoyed the visits. If our son had disliked them, we’d have reassessed.</p>
<p>
Hmm … I pretty much an analytical geek … and I give A LOT of weight to visits. It took me a long time to develop my personal decision process which is pretty much … gather a ton of data, chew on it for awhile, and then go with my what my guy wants me to do. However much “false” information is gathered on visited I can not believe it outweighs the true information gained and I can’t understand why people want to make a decision on less information.</p>
<p>To use one concrete example my oldest wanted to go to an urban school and I do not believe any amount of reading or internet snooping can match actually visiting and experiencing Georgetown, George Washington, Columbia, MIT, Johns Hopkins, Penn, Harvard, and BU … there are all certainly urban campuses but it would take a ton of detective work and a VERY perceptive 17 year old to figure out without visiting how amazingly different these urban campuses/environments are.</p>
<p>PS - personally I think a lot of times the lame excuse for not liking a school is the student trying to find something tangible as a reason (however trivial or dumb) when they just don’t like the place.</p>
<p>3togo</p>
<p>That’s exactly what I thought about my son’s reactions. He knew if a place didn’t feel right and found some reason, however lame, for rejecting it, but I think the reaction was sound.</p>
<p>And the big PS</p>
<p>I visited schools after getting my acceptances and switched where my choice because of the visits.</p>
<p>My oldest sent on a junior year spring break trip and switched her choices because of the visits … and moved a school of a size and type (single sex) to the top where both attributes were negative show stoppers before the trip (I believe FirstToGo picked the obvious best fit for her)</p>
<p>My middle kid visited before and after acceptances and flipped his list after the last school he visited; a school he added to his application list at the very last minute. (I believe SecondToGo picked the obvious best fit for him also).</p>
<p>Darn right I’ll take LastToGo on visits … my experience has been they only help improve decisions.</p>
<p>PS - the flips in these decisions in all 3 cases were to lower ranked schools we liked better than some higher ranked options.</p>
<p>I’m going to miss visiting colleges with my daughters, now that D2 has all her applications in and is waiting to see where she’ll be in the fall. It’s been an enjoyable series of mini-vacations, a great bonding experience, and a great opportunity for them to think about, and talk about, what’s important to them in a college. It’s harder for HS students to think about that in the abstract, but when they’re actually on a college campus, they start to visualize themselves there, and it becomes a bit easier to start to sort out which differences matter to them, and which don’t. And there are differences. Big, medium, or small? STEM-oriented, humanities-and-social sciences-focused, or balanced? Beautiful campus, or not so much? Co-ed, or women only? Dorms like palaces, or dorms like dumps? Easy access to a big city, or not? Easy transportation home, or not? Major Greek presence, smaller Greek presence, or none at all? Big-time sports scene, or not so much? Great college town, or not so much? Beautiful surrounding area, or not so much? Semesters or trimesters? J-term or not? Strengths in particular majors of possible interest, or not? Great rec center, or only so-so? Evidence of appealing extra-curriculars, or not? What do students do for fun, and how much time do they have for fun? </p>
<p>I feel my daughters both did a good job of sorting through these and similar questions during and after their college visits, and that inevitably led them to additional schools that fit the criteria they had identified as mattering most to them (and the criteria were actually quite different for each daughter, in ways that make sense to me given their own personalities and interests). Sure, there’s inevitably some tendency to misinterpret or overplay spot impressions of a particular school; go on a rainy or cold and blustery day and that school is going to look less appealing, have a great tour guide and the place will look terrific, squeeze in a visit immediately after a school that just knocked your socks off and school 2 will suffer by negative comparison, etc. But at the end of the day they both came up with pretty good lists of schools that they genuinely like and feel they know something about, not just from the visit but from the visit plus a lot of additional research and investigation, and their choices are based on factors more real and meaningful than, e.g., something as silly as a US News ranking, which unfortunately seems to be how many applicants form their lists these days.</p>
<p>One added benefit: for both my daughters, visiting college campuses early on was actually a big academic motivator. They started to visualize themselves attending college, and wanting it, and realizing that to have a realistic shot at some of the colleges they were most interested in, they needed to be extra-attentive to their studies. They’ve always been good students, but like many teenagers they had a certain hump they needed to get over when some of their friends were deciding that socializing was more important than studying. I think the college visits helped them keep their eyes on the prize.</p>
<p>I agree with Hunt, though, that college visits are a luxury good that many families simply can’t afford, or need to put off until the acceptances are in. I consider my family fortunate not to have been in that position, because I think we got a lot out of them.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, it’s nice to know my D isn’t the only one who ruled out (or ruled in) a school based on something trivial. She applied to one school because she liked the way the air smelled when she visited. (Yes, I can attest to the lovely orange blossom smell.) She had researched it beforehand and knew it would be a good fit, but the aroma sealed the deal. Unfortunately, she shared this little tidbit with her interviewer. Um, good luck…</p>
<p>To the OP, yes, I think school visits are vital in an era when many kids go far from their homes to college, rather than just to the local U as our parents’ generation did. I visited a lot of schools way back in 1980, the spring before my senior year, because I had lived a long time on the west coast and wanted to go back east to college. I ruled out one school because a frat boy threw a plumbing fixture out of a window during my visit, something that would never have made the college brochure.</p>
<p>For my D, college visits were the deal breaker. She did very well when it came to researching all her intended schools. Once we visited, and really looked around at the school, the student body, the culture and the surrounding area differences came into play. I do think we put more emphasis on visits than we did back in the day. More students are studying further away from home, more family funds are being put into this venture and I think we value “fit” more now than in the past. (or at least in MY past- my parents were not concerned with such issues.)</p>
<p>Mild interest in Columbia until I visited. When the two biggest reasons to apply are that you are an Ivy League and that you are in NYC, and not the student body or unique academic plans, you are not a big sell for a non-Ivy-wannabe like me. Did not apply.</p>
<p>Students to visit a campus to see if </p>
<p>(1) classes are interesting
(2) the weather is nice
(3) students are friendly
(4) cafeteria food is good</p>
<p>among other things. I think standardized student surveys (using the same questions and administered at nearly the same time, across colleges) about these “quality of college life” variables would be more meaningful than a student’s impressions from a few hours. Do such surveys exist? My guess is that a student’s satisfaction with college will be more correlated with the average satisfaction who actually went their for four years than with the prospective student’s impressions from a few-hour visit.</p>
<p>Here is an analogy. What better predicts whether someone will like a movie, her impression of the movie trailer or the average rating of the movie by people who actually saw it? My guess would be the latter.</p>
<p>We probably will visit colleges with our children, but I will try to caution them from giving too much weight to the visits.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Don’t you see how random this is? If you had walked by 5 minutes earlier or later, you would not have witnessed this incident. A survey asking students how often they engaged in binge drinking would be more informative.</p>
<p>
Interesting choice of an example. It depends a lot on how well your tastes line up with the mainstream voters in the survey. For me using a global survey of movie goers to judge a movie would next to worthless. On the other hand a survey of my friends would be very helpful.</p>
<p>There are numerous surveys about the best college town and Boston and Burlington Vermont are likely to be back-to-back on the listing … and they are polar opposite college experiences.</p>
<p>What was #1 on paper for my D dropped to the bottom after visiting. Visiting was was very well worth it.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I completely disagree. Lots of people like horror movies and give them rave reviews. I can’t stand them, and neither can my daughters. Lots of people like “action” movies and give them rave reviews; I can take them or leave them, mostly leave them, and my daughters can’t stand them. Most Americans have no patience for foreign language films with subtitles, and find many of them boring, stuffy, slow-moving, pretentious, precious, or whatever; many of my favorite movies of all time are foreign language films with subtitles, while my daughters are only now starting to acquire a taste for them. (We watched and very much enjoyed an absolutely hilarious French film the other night on DVD, “Bienvenue Chez Les Chtix,” which was never marketed for general release in the U.S., probably because some combination of Hollywood marketing expertise and focus-group testing said it would never generate much of a U.S. audience). </p>
<p>You wrongly assume that we are uniform in our tastes and preferences in movies, and in colleges. I say you’re dead wrong on both counts.</p>
<p>I will say this much: I can never be certain that a movie I think will be good from the trailer actually turns out to be good; sometimes the trailer is better than the movie. But well over 90% of the time, if I see the trailer and think, “That’s not the kind of movie I have any interest in,” I turn out to be correct in that judgment, even if the movie turns out to be a smash hit with the broader movie-going public. And I’d say probably well over 90% of the movie trailers I see these days place the movie on a mental checklist titled, “Nope!” But obviously they keep making those movies, because someone out there–a lot of someones–must like them.</p>